Beyond the Family Blueprint

A child is born with a unique personality, but it is also inherited in multiple ways by the parents and primary caregivers. That’s where the popular debate of nature vs nurture comes from.

The genetic make-up, physical looks, diseases, and most importantly, the psyche are inherited from the parents in more ways than we would like to admit. Children inherit the psychological tendencies from primary caregivers through direct genetic inheritance and environmental factors such as parental behaviours and the environment they grow up in. For example, parents’ genes can influence the environment they create, a concept known as genetic nurture, which indirectly shapes their offspring’s traits and behaviours. Additionally, early life experiences and trauma can leave biological traces in children, influencing their emotional responses and mental health predispositions.

A popular psychology theory called Object Relations discusses how primary relationships, especially with primary caregivers like parents or grandparents, shape an individual’s personality and internal psychological world. The theory highlights the internalization of these relationships and how they form the blueprint for future interactions, theoretically leading to a fully functioning personality or a dysfunctional one.

Simply put, a child will internalise both the parents’ positive and negative traits and their relationship with them. Children inherit this in bits and pieces, and that forms their personality. For example, a child who sees an unhappy marriage where the father is aggressive and the mother is passive may unconsciously choose the mother’s passivity or the father’s aggression. So, what is this choice based on?

A child’s most significant need is to feel emotionally safe, which means he wants to feel in control and choose any way he can avoid any conflicting or disturbing situation. If he finds that the father is angry and he starts screaming out of fear, and the father stops getting angry, he learns that he can feel safe by screaming and expressing his anger, and becomes an adult with anger issues similar to the father. Or the child stays silent in the face of the aggression, like the mother, and realises that the father’s anger stops because of that. So, he decides that silence can help resolve conflict and becomes the ‘quiet type,’ a classic conflict-avoidant personality.

Children accept or reject their parents’ habits, traits, and values based on how they impact their sense of safety.